The legend needed a body, and in April 1923 it got one. Lord Carnarvon, the wealthy Englishman who had financed Carter's dig, died in Cairo just months after the tomb was opened. The cause was mundane and sad: a mosquito bite he nicked while shaving, which became infected and spread into erysipelas, a streptococcal skin infection, and then pneumonia. Carnarvon had long suffered from weak lungs, ever since a car accident years before, and his immune system was easily overwhelmed. But the timing was irresistible. Two weeks before he died, the novelist Marie Corelli had published a letter warning that dire punishment awaited anyone who disturbed a sealed tomb. When Carnarvon died, the press had its prophecy and its victim, and the curse was born fully formed.

Once the story took hold, every coincidence became evidence. On the day the tomb was opened, a cobra, the serpent of Egyptian royalty, was said to have eaten Carter's pet canary, and the tale spread as an omen. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a devoted spiritualist, told reporters that vengeful spirits conjured by Tutankhamun's priests might have killed Carnarvon. A mummified hand mounted as a paperweight, a house that burned down, a flood, a death on the French Riviera; each was folded into the legend. The newspapers of the 1920s, hungry for Egyptian glamour after the most dazzling archaeological find in history, printed it all. The curse was less a discovery than a collaboration between grief, superstition, and a public that desperately wanted the story to be true.

The trouble with the curse is that it spared almost everyone. Of the fifty-eight people present when the tomb and sarcophagus were opened, only eight died within a dozen years, hardly the toll a vengeful pharaoh might be expected to take. Howard Carter, the man who actually unsealed the burial and would surely have been the curse's first target, lived another sixteen years and died of cancer in 1939 at sixty-four. Lady Evelyn Herbert, Carnarvon's daughter and among the very first to step inside, lived until 1980. A formal study of those present found no meaningful difference between their lifespans and anyone else's. The curse, examined statistically, simply evaporates.

Modern attempts to rescue the legend have looked to biology rather than magic. Sealed tombs can harbor molds, including Aspergillus flavus, whose spores have been blamed for illnesses after other tomb openings, and some have wondered whether such pathogens contributed to a few of the deaths. It is a more respectable theory than ghosts, but the evidence is thin; a review in The Lancet concluded that toxic fungi almost certainly had nothing to do with Carnarvon, who was only one of many to enter the tomb repeatedly while others went unharmed. The truth is that genuine tomb curses did exist in ancient Egypt, but they were rare, private warnings meant for priests, asking them to keep a tomb pure, not blanket threats against robbers or archaeologists. The mummy's curse we know today was assembled far more recently, in horror novels and newspaper columns, and it endures not because it is true but because, like the tombs themselves, it refuses to stay buried.